


Officer of the Court

by Glory1863



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Character Study, Episode: s04e07 Memoriam, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-20
Updated: 2015-02-20
Packaged: 2018-03-13 22:46:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3399041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glory1863/pseuds/Glory1863
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He is an officer of the court and, in the end, that is why he had to leave his family, or so he tells himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Officer of the Court

He is a lawyer, an officer of the court.  He knows that in many parts of the country being a lawyer from Las Vegas means that he must work for either the moguls or the Mob and that sometimes it’s difficult to tell the difference, but for all its glitz, glam and bright lights, the residents of Las Vegas have all the same mundane problems that people everywhere else face, and this bread-and-butter type of law is what he practices.

He is an officer of the court and is intimately acquainted with Family Court.  Even after a number of years, he still has compassion for those who fell in love and married with stars in their eyes and hope in their hearts.  He knows too well how people change over time, how the stars dim and hope dies. 

He is an officer of the court who handles divorces.  He is married, but separated, although his clients don’t know that.  How could they?  He still wears her ring.  He has a reputation for long hours and hard work, not partying and sleeping around.  He warns his battling clients against torching their past.  He doesn’t understand why they want to and they don’t understand why he doesn’t believe in revenge. 

Perhaps it would help if he could explain his own situation, but he can’t.  It’s too private, the hurt too deep, the danger to others too great.  He still loves, and always will, the woman that she was – beautiful, brave, smart, funny, fierce - before the schizophrenia came to rule her mind.   

He is an officer of the court.  He knows what the going rate is for spousal support, what the old-timers still call alimony and grimace when they say it.  He’s always paid her more than that, transferring money to her account from the one he has offshore, one that would be hard to trace back to him even should his son try.  He has friends in the Bar Association, ones who **do** have moguls and mobsters for clients.  It was a piece of cake for one of them to set it up. 

She deserved to keep her home, that and her son being the only things that kept her relatively sane for years.  She deserves to have a comfortable life.  She wouldn’t get it on SSI alone.  He made a promise to her years ago - to love, honor and cherish for better, for worse, in sickness and in health - and this much, at least, he’s kept.

He knows how it feels to have a child of whom he is inordinately proud but hasn’t seen in years, a child he doesn’t know and perhaps, on honest consideration, never understood.  That said, it doesn’t mean he loves the boy any less. 

He is an officer of the court.  He knows the rules for child support from front to back and back to front.  He’s always provided more than the minimum for his son from that same offshore account and made sure there was money set aside for college (even if the boy could snag a full-ride academic scholarship).  He and his wife had talked about this, all the things they’d wanted for their children, long before she’d felt the first stirrings of life within, long before they’d even married.  It was another promise made that he was determined to keep even as his world fell apart around him.

He is an officer of the court, so the night that his wife comes home with her clothing spattered with blood, at first catatonic and then manic, babbling about the murder of a murderer, he knows he’s faced with a no-win scenario. 

He is an officer of the court.  It’s his job to report this, but if he does, it will mean the end for his wife.  Oh, he’s sure she wouldn’t be accused.  Even an indictment as an accessory is a long shot.  No, his problem is that he can’t allow her to be called as a witness.  He can’t allow her to testify. 

He is an officer of the court.  He knows how the legal system works.  He has colleagues in the Bar Association who will do whatever it takes to get their clients off, and by that he really does mean “whatever.”  He has colleagues in the Bar Association who are just temperamentally predisposed to ripping opposing witnesses to shreds.  He even has colleagues in the Bar Association who have taken a personal dislike to him and would jump at the chance to take him and his squeaky clean reputation down a peg or two.    

He is an officer of the court, but he is a husband first, and he cannot allow his wife to be subjected to that.  It’s one thing for a misogynist co-worker of his wife’s to opine that too much book learning isn’t good for a woman.  It’s one thing for others at the university to speculate on the nature of his wife’s illness.  It’s one thing for people in the neighborhood to consider his wife a little strange but essentially harmless.  It’s another thing entirely for her to suffer a total meltdown in court, to lose all dignity, to perhaps never recover, even to her current baseline.  No, even if he is an officer of the court, that is something he cannot permit.  He’d made that promise to her all those years ago.  It doesn’t matter that he didn’t realize it at the time.  He knows it now. 

He is an officer of the court, but if he is going to ignore his duty to the justice system in favor of his duty to his wife, then he must craft a scenario that will give him plausible deniability if the whole mess blows up.  If he is disbarred, then he is of no help to anyone, least of all his wife and son. 

First, he destroys evidence in the form of his wife’s bloody clothes.  He’s not aware that his son sees him do it, but then there’s a lot about his son of which he’s not aware.  Next, he decides to move out.  His wife isn’t happy about it, even calls him weak, and this he knows his son hears.  He wishes it otherwise, but perhaps it’s just as well.  When his wife eventually speaks to others of that horrible night – and he truly believes it will be when, not if – it should be enough to attribute her ramblings to her illness, but if it isn’t, then he can claim he’d heard nothing of it as they were living apart, the usual irreconcilable differences having finally taken their toll.

The years and the cases come and go.  He is still an officer of the court.  The funds from the offshore account are now used to make payments to Bennington, an upscale sanitarium with reputable doctors who provide excellent care for his wife.  His son has several doctorates, though not a JD he thinks sadly.  There had been a time when he'd dreamed of the firm Reid and Reid, Attorneys at Law, but at least his son works for the FBI.  A thumb drive can hold all he knows about the boy.  Now and again he hears rumors about an old case down in lock-up or over at the courthouse.  He's well known in those places, and members of law enforcement think nothing of speaking freely in front of him.  There doesn’t seem to be any way (or any desire on the part of law enforcement) to connect that case to his family, but the fear is still there.  He’s lived with it so long that it’s a part of his life like his beat-up car, his modest house and the empty space in his soul that once was filled by Diana and Spencer.

He is an officer of the court and, in the end, that is why he had to leave his family, or so he tells himself. 


End file.
